Margins | No. 5

The Drek Death and Doom Newsletter

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I. Editor’s Note
II. Open Calls
III. Margin Comments
IV. A Call to Arms
V. What’s New
VI. Coming Soon
VII. Advice
VIII. What to Watch Out For

I

Editor’s Note:

The New Year rolls in quietly like some muted front of invisible wildfire. A spectral tidal wave of time. It works over the earth until it finds its ouroboroid tail. It’s somewhere on its way—having touched some, others yet—and muse fingers claw impotent where haste-made resolutions wither and curl and die.

Resolutions…

My New Year comes like all others, in the pitch black night dotted by stars made brighter by the crisp air, where the windows creak and groan under drifting squalls and the furnace plumes heat without rest. The minute and second and hour hands thread, then in place of some gavelled blow or a golden trumpet drawn for armageddon, only the wind whistles through the cracks as the brittle snow hisses on the glass like sand, and when the clock ticks final, it is only the cold and the quiet violence of the new year’s frost bite that stays.

Resolutely.

There isn’t a goal or a promise to myself I’m keeping. We are wind-tossed beings; we change and move on different currents, shaped by our environments, every second of every day. It’s now a new winter for me in a different marked year, here, maybe for you, too. I’ve spent enough time in enough kitchens, enough gyms, enough hospitals for a lifetime of this-year-is-gonna-be-the-year-I’m-gonna-change. Spent enough time among enough artists, enough athletes, enough writers for a lifetime of long-sought checklists of course-altering life events annually tossed aside.

There are no resolutions here.

Only a realignment.

A correction, and a soft exit.

Sincerely.

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II
Open Calls:

1.

Drek Death and Doom and Nascent Night Press are both open for long fiction submissions. Novellas, Novels.

For long fiction submissions, send query letter and first chapter. I will ask for the full thing if I want a closer look.

Submit at submissions@drekdeathanddoom.com.

2.

Drek Death and Doom is seeking original horror fiction that aims to inflict terror while demonstrating dangerous command of craft. We want stories written with intention and artistry.

III
Margin Comments

1.

Please familiarize yourself with who I am, what I like, and the things I publish. I think there’s a common misconception that presses accept work based on writing ability alone, when the truth is, it’s about a piece fitting in a certain spot for a specific purpose—and that piece projecting the correct press-branding, while also meeting the qualitative and preferential criteria of a specific editor’s personal tastes.

2.

Much of my audience is misaligned. This is made clearer by point number 1. I get submissions that are effectively other genres; submissions that don’t even hint at the call request. It doesn’t matter if the writing is good, you see? Like jamming a square peg into a round hole sideways.

3.

This misalignment (of audience) isn’t anybody’s fault; it was inevitable as soon as I published another writer and publicly promoted myself as a publisher. Inevitable, and quick—made possible by how this platform works.

• How does it work?

  • It promotes engagement over true immersion in favor of algorithmic manipulation.

  • Writers benefit from more visibility and click-engagement by writing shorter pieces with easily digestible themes which can be analyzed thoroughly in the time it takes to leave a one-sentence comment. It places pieces with less weight and a lower intellectual barrier on a higher pedestal. I’m aware outliers exist.

  • The token-gathering encourages surface-level reading and surface-level writing, where the responsibility to promote oneself now resides in also liking and commenting and sharing, perpetuating the cycle. Yes, I am aware outliers exist.

  • Substack is a space that provides proximity, and the social-media aspects foster community. Which can be great, but it dilutes the implied boundaries that exist in certain fields.

  • About all this, and about community: There are three different fiction writing markets reading this thinking it is about them right now. Newbie authors, writing for fun, not caring about any of this. Published authors, trying to create a newsletter as a funnel to more readers. The prestige-path guys, utterly confused by this talk that squeals of sudaeic genre. Just another perk of substack’s functioning.

• So what happened

  • In short, with experience breaking into the indie horror markets, some good callouts in reviews, a couple spotlights, I came here for readers. I wanted more eyes, maybe some fans. Readers of my already published work could subscribe, and they would receive newsletters about the horror fiction world, and, my free fiction—some of which was only available to buy in print at the time.

  • That’s what it was for a while. But like I said before, after putting out there that I was a publisher, the entire foundation rolled. Inevitable.

  • I want to be clear that this isn’t some condemnation of people or a take-down of substack or anything of the sort. This is a love note to my subscribers explaining the blood on the wall. Why Substack is no longer a good home for me or my work and hasn’t been for some time.

  • It is a structural mismatch, incompatible with how I want to write, and how I want my author home to operate. Unfortunately, the mismatch is a platform design tailored to group psychology, and when I began publishing others, this was bound.

  • Bound? Yes. This environment heavily favors content that causes interest ripples. Fiction is prioritized far less than a post offering a struggling demographic something many are sort of desperate for.

  • My business posts passed the proverbial desks of every writer this side of the speculative line, and many (not all of you, you know who you are) writers subbed and followed at the prospect of being published, not for the content of the newsletter.

  • Forced my hand. To maintain a peer presence is to encourage influence while harboring the danger of conceding standards to popular pressures that’ve forcibly altered the landscape here.

This is stuff I’m not interested in defending, refining, or negotiating. This is what the decision is, and why. I’m fully aware that this might be summarized as hostile, or gatekeeping or something, even bitter? I know that’s going to be easier for people to reckon with than what I’m actually describing. So if that’s what you want to take from it, or it’s what you need and it makes you feel better, that’s on you. Just know it isn’t accurate.

4.

We pivot.

This publication will no longer house my fiction.
It will function as the semi-automated home of news and updates from Drek Death and Doom Publishing LLC

Go back to number one though, the thing about familiarizing yourself. Because, aside from subscribers not being subscribed for my fiction, the ones subscribed for the press are now overwhelmingly not aligned with the press.

This space was not my press. The microphone I switched on to send people there was an advertisement, not a foundational rebranding. I tried to compensate by giving to the crowd who’d entered the opened doors what they wanted, which was a direct newsletter and sections.

The force of the insulated clamor to be this thing smashed through my resistance before I could reinforce it enough with my own boundaries. The newsletter became a press billboard.

Square peg, round-ass hole—now a flood and a pale to curve it.

5.

Final thoughts on misalignment, and something I’ll try to throw out there gently, if that’s a thing I can do.

Guys, my work is outright adversarial. I find often that my new subscribers are outwardly religious. So much so, it’s startling how countless many of you have something declaring your faith in your bios.

I have nothing against the faithful as individuals representative of their professed morals. But…

Do you guys read my work? I’m not neutral and I never have been. I’m in moral opposition to organized religion, particularly the Abrahamic ones. Not for aesthetics, either. This press operates outwardly and openly from an anti-theistic position, and will not publish work that tries to affirm belief systems, or promote any sort of religious authority. Don’t mistake an editorial and moral standard I’m declaring to be some exclusionary discriminatory practice, either. Religious people can get published here. Not pro-religious stories.

My imagery is almost exclusively heretical depictions of religious figures and scenes. I don’t know if this is another example of surface-level engagement resulting in people subbing where they normally wouldn’t, or if people truly are weighing publication proximity over the values they’ve built their moral foundations upon.

I want to make sure you're placing your own work, too, where it’s not going to cause trips to the confessional over it.

My intention here isn’t to offend or alienate anyone, but to point out the severity of some of the audience misalignment.

IV
A Call to Arms:

1.

End it

2.

Things aren’t as inaccessible as some would have you believe

Need help with alacarte publishing items and don’t want to publish with my press?

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V
What’s New?

Shop Now

https://drekdeathanddoom.com/shop/

VI.
Coming Soon:

Here’s the grimy stuff. Out of the 50-some stories for the Bloodlust anthology submitted to me, I have a pool of twelve that, upon first-reads, I considered to be in the realm of acceptance.

That’s not enough. Even that twelve will be whittled down.

I am going to go back through the pieces I originally didn’t peg as possibilities to look for things I may have missed. If a few more surprise me, we may yet have a book. I don’t want to float the possibility of working with “close” rejections to meet press standards because that’s not a way I want to work, no matter how much I’d like to see this book out, so please don’t DM me to ask if your submission is borderline.

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VII
Advice:

Part of writing here is to accept that you are growing in an ecosystem wanting to be closed that rewards social-media behavior and algorithm-friendly content, which is only tested against itself within that same ecosystem. Compounding that problem is the proneness for overcompensatory self-designated expertise to take root and present itself as supportive while quietly taking away durable craftwork and attempting to devalue unassailable standards. There’s no consequence inside a closed loop where insinuations and proclamations substitute record and proven work.

Be wary of bad actors. Be wary of people who demand you write to their subjective interpretations of what fiction should be, particularly when it comes to style.

Like, “trad” might suck, or gatekeeping might be stiff because of how absurdly oversaturated indie writing is, but the insistence of forgoing what marks fiction as publishable by nearly every industry standard is fucking detrimental. Take what the “publishing is terrible” accounts are saying, them and their dozens to hundreds of subscribers and their car note and their paycheck to paycheck budget still grasping for an angle in the same place you are without any more real-life people who know their namefacevalue than know yours, and weigh what they say against the standards that have produced instant best sellers, cult classics, and mass-market entertainment forever. You have to at least know the rules of the game and be somewhat adept at it before you can attempt to change it.

Play the game for a while. Do your silly little formalities and your textbook grammar, for now.

I agree, there is a very real disconnect in much of the larger fiction market and what is generally needed at the moment, but that is also a product of market confusion caused by this very fucking thing.

VIII
What to Look Out For:

1.

Instead of listing posts I’ve recently enjoyed, here’s things to actually look out for.

1. A lot of you are writing like how you think writing should sound. You are writing a story because you want to write a story and you’re forcing it. Settle into your characters. Let them live.

2. What the fuck is with people creating alt-accounts for their fake, AI-author identities? When someone new jumps on here who very clearly knows how to game the platform, and their stuff is polished to a fault, glistening and window-shiny compact, pre-packaged for easy consumption and engagement, and a quick google search returns nothing whatsoever ever written by that person appearing anywhere online—you guys should look a little more inquisitively.

3. Also, pay attention, because writers who’ve been clean here for a long time are suddenly either subsonsciously tapping into and emulating AI prevalence in their own writing, or they’ve jumped over and given up and don’t care about editing AI markers out.

4. 2026…uh…since I’m not doing fiction here for free anymore, keep an eye out in these newsletters for info on whenever my new stories are going to show up in an anthology or on a website somewhere. I’m going to be seeking representation for a novel this year, so I’ll sprinkle in some updates there as well.

   All that matters is the work.

Thanks as always, so much, for reading.

the next one will be shorter, I promise

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